A number of attempts have been made in the past to use natural materials as polymeric building blocks. These have mainly centered on grafting natural materials (e.g., sugars and starches) with synthetic monomers. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,854,191, 5,223,171, 5,227,446 and 5,296,470 disclose the use of graft copolymers in cleaning applications. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,580,154 and 5,580,941 disclose sulfonated monomers grafted onto mono-, di- and oligosaccharides.
The synthetic portions of these graft copolymers disclosed in the literature are made up of mixtures of the synthetic monomers if more than one monomer is used. This leads to the formation of synthetic chains in the graft copolymer that have a blend of properties of the two monomers which does not take full advantage of the functionality of both monomer moieties.
Accordingly, there is a need to maximize the performance obtained from these monomers.